By Benjamin Forgey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 26, 2000; Page C01

NEW YORK –– Times Square is, of course, an orgy of consumption, a celebration of plenty. The cacophonous billboards shout at you to buy, buy, buy, and do so with an ostentatious expenditure of electrical energy.

How thoroughly ironic, then, is the location of the Conde Nast tower--also known by its prominent address, 4 Times Square. This is the 48-story skyscraper that while going up received lots of national and even international press for being sensitive to the environment. It was called, in one publication, the "Green Giant."

Can a skyscraper be environmentally friendly? Fundamentally, the answer is no. Literally and figuratively, tall buildings are consumers of the highest order, requiring immense amounts of energy to build and to maintain. It is all that steel, the elevators, the closed windows . . . the sheer size.

Even so, there is no question that towers can be made friendlier to the environment. In the design and construction of tall buildings, the norm has been a blatant disregard for ecological consequences. This is where 4 Times Square fits in.

The building is a serious attempt by both developer and architects--the Durst Organization and Fox & Fowle Architects, respectively--to introduce elements of environmental responsibility into the skyscraper world. By no means is it a revolutionary building. The energy-saving concepts and technologies used for the most part are conventional. But it is an important demonstration in the oft short-sighted world of commercial real estate development.

Office buildings account for a quarter of all electrical energy consumed in the United States. Bringing that ratio down clearly can yield long-term economic and ecological benefits. Obviously, saving energy in skyscrapers would be a significant contribution. Estimates of the long-term savings at 4 Times Square, compared with the conventional skyscrapers of a decade ago, range from 20 to 40 percent.

You have to stand at 42nd Street and Broadway, immersed in the blitz and buzz of all the signs, to fully appreciate the irony of teaching environmental lessons at Times Square. Although there are finishing touches still to come--most notably, architect Frank Gehry's squiggly glass cafe for Conde Nast employees--it is clear that this new skyscraper participates in the energy-devouring visual deluge.

Participates enthusiastically. Extending perhaps a dozen feet from the sleek lower floors at the 42nd Street corner, and following the building's sweeping curve, is a massive steel superstructure supporting a huge billboard (currently plugging "The Sopranos"). The 43rd Street corner is defined by what Robert Fox and his colleagues at Fox & Fowle Architects refer to as "the can"--a six-story tilting cylinder that Nasdaq, at a cost of $37 million, turned into Broadway's brightest, most computerized new display.

Even the peak of the building is a sign--rather, four signs. In addition to towering antennas, the top is an armature for four 70-foot-by-70-foot electronic billboards, one for each of the building's sides. (Only one, for Teligent communications systems, has so far been completed.) These are the largest signs on the New York skyline. They rent for more than $1 million per year.

Clearly, the Conde Nast tower is not what architects would refer to as an "object building." That is, it is not a consistent aesthetic whole in the manner, say, of the World Trade Center towers or the Empire State and Chrysler buildings. Any one of these buildings, or almost any normal big building, for that matter, would be desecrated--if not actually obliterated--by signs of such size and vehemence.

This very unusual skyscraper is an urban collage. It changes from side to side and from bottom to top. Although glass is the predominant sheathing material, the east and south facades have large sections of stone facing. This is in response, the architects say, to the more sedate sociology of the midtown business district. The west and north facades, by contrast, are all "Times Square"--brazen, piecemeal and modern, with signs attached like so many oversize patches.

Manifestly, you give up something with this mode of design--the pleasures and satisfactions that come when all the pieces fit harmoniously together. As you circle it, this building tends to look a bit provisional, not quite finished. Disconcertingly, some facades are much better than others--the best view, by my way of reckoning, is the oblique angle from the southwest, across 42nd Street. From there, you see mostly the "Times Square" part of the building, and it is lively and sleek. (The top is pretty neat from any point of view.)

But there are advantages to the collage approach. It acknowledges that, when you are standing at the base of a very tall building, its top doesn't matter much--but what is in front of you emphatically does. This simple awareness enabled the architects not to break a sweat when designing ground-floor retail spaces in toss-away vernaculars that have little to do with the rest of the building. This fits right in with the jumbled Times Square ambiance.

As a matter of fact, Times Square's famous ambiance had a lot to do with the design right from the get-go. The redevelopment of the area has been bitterly contested since the early '80s, when four historicist towers with Mansard tops were unveiled as the wave of Times Square's future. Designed for developer George Klein by Philip Johnson and John Burgee, they were unified, consistent--and awful.

The Johnson-Burgee designs stimulated a torrent of objections and, eventually, an innovative set of mandatory, pro-sign design guidelines for the Times Square area. These had not been truly tested, however, until 4 Times Square came along--it proves conclusively that it's possible to design a skyscraper that responds to and enhances this loud, strange, entertaining environment. A building of many parts, it both mimics and contributes to Times Square's complexity. And the best thing about it, of course, is that it inventively accommodates the billboards, even in its splendid cap.

Well, perhaps second best. In the long run, the developer and architects of this building may better be remembered for making an environmental start. It is not so much what they did as how they did it--and the fact that they did it at all.

Starting at the very beginning of the design process, they put energy-conservation options on the table. Many were rejected for cost reasons. Others were included primarily for symbolic value--a prime example being the 260 photovoltaic panels incorporated in the upper levels of the facades, capable of producing but a minuscule percentage of the building's energy needs. In the end, however, a respectable list of the energy-saving and clean-air devices and systems were built into the fabric of this building--enough to make a difference.

The building's signs, of course, will eat up any energy savings--and then some. But in the matter of correcting irresponsible habits you have to start somewhere. In a perverse sort of way 4 Times Square may be the ideal place.

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